Childish Gambino's Camp Is No Fun

There's a good chance Camp, the official full-length debut from rapper Childish Gambino, will land a top spot on the Billboard 200 after it debuts Tuesday, but that won't make it good. The album's success is practically guaranteed because of the MC's real name--Donald Glover. Glover has become a jack-of-all-trades in the comedy world thanks to his work as a founding member of Internet sketch group Derrick Comedy, a writer for beloved NBC sitcom 30 Rock, and an actor on another beloved NBC sitcom called Community. In the past few years he's garnered a rabid, cult fanbase that has, among other things, campaigned to get him the role of Peter Parker in the new Spider-Man movie.

Those fans have also downloaded Glover's deep back-catalog of free Childish Gambino mixtapes and albums despite the fact that the quality of those collections are spotty at best. Camp is no different. Though the production quality has improved, much of the magnetic, approachable personality Glover injects in his acting and stand-up comedy is absent, replaced by a laundry list of personal pain and some sharply conflicting egotistical boasting, all underscored by an endless stream of forced pop culture references.

Glover's lyrics aren't the only thing that distinctly cite other parts of our collective culture: His rapping and instrumentals are heavily cribbed from other, better artists. His raspy, aggressive spitting on lead single "Bonfire" and the tune's bombastic hook come straight from the book of Lil Wayne; The instrumental for "Sunrise" is a rip-off of a futuristic, funky jam by indie-pop Yeasayer that shares the same name--which Glover rapped over on a cut from his first I am Just a Rapper EP called "I Can Hear Your Feet (Sunrise)"; On album opener "Outside" Glover desperately wants to recreate the luxurious hip-hop soundscape of Kanye West circa My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Needless to say, the album is all over the place, and while Glover's body of music has always exhibited a strain of schizophrenia, that's usually been a thematic issue he's dealt with through sheer pluck and personality. On Camp there's an uneasy lack of cohesion that pervades throughout the entire album: It makes Glover sound less assured, transforms its most interesting and accessible moments into lackluster experiences, and makes the collection feel ten times longer than it is.

At the center of Camp is a scuffle between "Donald Glover: The nice, down-to-earth guy you should feel sorry for" and "Donald Glover: The ultimate lothario and the world's most talented being," a battle in which there are no winners. Glover has never been able to handle the disconnect between these two sides of his personality before, and the vacillation between them from track to track is jarring. Despite the fact that Glover does his best to open up and reveal difficult parts about his childhood and current lifestyle in a sincere and perhaps unsettling manner, it's hard to empathize or sympathize with a guy who places women on a pedestal on one track, only to knock them off said pedestal and objectify them in a juvenile manner on the next tune.

Perhaps some MCs have the skills to pull off such tricky thematic work, but Glover isn't one of them: His spitting comes out in sloppy globs, and it's sometimes unfocused and nonsensical. Even when he isn't boasting about the size of his genitalia or being the greatest MC around, Glover's delivery smacks of smarminess. He tends to emphasize his most intricate referential points as if he were underlining, italicizing and bolding a certain phrase to show off just how clever he is, which is just about as enticing as a guy who tries to pick up women by telling them his decades-old SAT scores. Not to mention that he tries to reach too high and often falls flat, like one "memorable" lyric from "Bonfire": "'You're my favorite rapper now,' Yeah, dude, I better be / Or you can f***** kiss my a**, Human Centipede." (This line is also an excellent example of Glover's nonsense: While straining to reference the infamous horror movie, he overlooks its "medical accuracy" as those involved in the grotesque chain don't have the physical ability to kiss because the villain in the first film removes the lips of those in the centipede.) For someone who has made a career out of crafting perfect punchlines, Glover doesn't seem to know how to properly put together lyrics that can land a punch.

Camp is a mess that goes beyond Glover's shortcomings as a rapper. The entire package sounds shlocky and gaudy: It has an "everything but the kitchen sink" feel to its production, with so many overblown string arrangements and instrumental pieces that the whole thing is a few didgeridoos short of being a joke about an egotistical musician that Glover might have written into a sketch. Though he clearly has plenty to say about race, rap, and his personal experiences, Glover's ability to express that in hip-hop needs work--lots of it. He may have some talent for rapping, but it never really blossoms into anything worth listening to on Camp. But that won't stop people from buying it: Glover has made enough fans with his other talents to trick people into thinking that his rapping is somehow on par with his other skills.